Friends in Common: Radical Friendship and Everyday Solidarities

by Laura C. Forster and Joel White

With its revolutionary potential, friendship stands as a formidable force against a profoundly anti-social capitalist system. Friends in Common explores friendship as a radical practice, empowering us to challenge hierarchies and produce social change. Friendship can transcend social boundaries and political borders. It is vital in building communities and underpinning solidarity. But its transformative potency ensures that it is heavily policed and restrained by the state. Understanding the radical possibilities of friendship can help us rethink our approach to family, work, and politics and show us new routes to resistance and ways to open up spaces of solidarity and escape. The dissonance created by comparing societal expectations around friendship and a lonely reality, especially after an isolating global pandemic, is profoundly alienating. Friends in Common shows that friendship as a political practice is foundational to strengthening revolutionary ideas and projects and is the antidote to capitalist despair.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0745350585
• ISBN13: 9780745350585
• Release Date: June 2025
• Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
• Length: 208 Pages